Lasers are useful in medical, materials processing, and other applications to cause ablation, i.e., substance removal, within a substrate, e.g., a biological tissue. In many cases, lasers cause such ablation by rapidly and locally heating a target substance until the target substance vaporizes.
Selective laser ablation can be accomplished by using laser wavelengths that are strongly absorbed by the target tissue and only weakly absorbed by other tissue. Thus, the target tissue absorbs an amount of laser energy above a threshold for laser ablation and is removed, whereas the other tissue absorbs an amount of laser energy below the threshold and remains. However, many medical lasers and delivery systems currently available do not always operate at wavelengths that are absorbed substantially more by some types of tissue and not by other types of tissue.